6 Unique Ways to Improve Communication in Your Business
Effective communication can affect nearly everything in business. Companies that have high quality internal and external communication can be more successful and can outlive businesses that struggle with it. Employees who work in companies that have effective communication strategies have a much better chance of being successful.
Since poor communication can be a serious issue, this article will outline the ways that you can avoid it at all costs.
1. Touch Base with Staff Regularly
Be sure that you check in with team members every day (or week at a minimum) to improve internal communication. It’s important to get perspective on the tasks and projects that they’re currently working on because they probably have ideas and opinions that could make a difference to the company. Daily meetings can be shorter than 10 minutes but can provide a great deal of cohesion.
2. Keep Your Door Open
When employees feel like they can’t talk to their supervisors, they might avoid raising important issues, which can impact free communication. Choosing to hold an open door policy can help your staff members feel better about raising concerns no matter what time it is. It also increases your approachability.
3. Send Out a Weekly Email Update
While it can be challenging to get all of your employees on the same page, a simple routine update can keep things cohesive. Send out updates of any size that affect the department or company. If weekly is too frequent for you, consider a bi-weekly department update.
4. Keep a Written Record
Having things recorded with timestamps can be incredibly valuable later on when you need to go back and follow the paper trail. Companies with a lot of employees will find this even more useful. Many companies operate under the motto, “If it’s not documented, it didn’t happen.”
5. Assess Your Communication Abilities
If the management doesn’t have the best communication skills, it can have ripple effects down to the rest of the team. Modeling positive communication for your team can help them realize how they can improve the way that they work with one another as well.
“Improve your skills in any way that you can, and if there are any workshops that your team could also benefit from, consider making it a company outing,” remarked Jim Parrish, partner of Parrish Law Firm, PLLC.
6. Don’t Take Your Achievements For Granted
Look at how your employees have improved as a team in regards to their communication. Since there are many benefits of better communication, don’t forget to celebrate the team achievements after you’ve been working on these points for a while. Usually, you’ll find data that demonstrates how much more productive the department has become. Anything that shows the increased performance can help boost employee morale.
In short, never discount the importance of successful communication in your department. While it can take time and logging everything over email might seem tedious at first, the efforts will be worthwhile in the end. Achieving cohesion among a diverse team can be done with regular meetings, milestones, and communication of expectations.
